


Rage and Raw Talent

by PR Zed (przed)



Category: Stumptown (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-25 08:35:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21813139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/przed/pseuds/PR%20Zed
Summary: "Jesus, Dex.  What did you do?  Punch the guy with your face?""Of course not."  Dex winces as Grey hits a particularly nasty scrape along the line of her jaw.  "That would be dumb.""And you've never done anything dumb in your life," Grey says, his voice as flat as he can make it.It's not always easy, being best friends with Dex Perios.
Relationships: Grey McConnell & Dex Parios
Comments: 29
Kudos: 78
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Rage and Raw Talent

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thestarsapart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thestarsapart/gifts).



> This story occurs just a bit before the first episode.

"Jesus, Dex. What did you do? Punch the guy with your face?"

"Of course not." Dex winces as Grey hits a particularly nasty scrape along the line of her jaw. "That would be dumb."

"And you've never done anything dumb in your life," Grey says, his voice as flat as he can make it.

"Nope," Dex says, looking as innocent as anyone with a black eye and multiple contusions could.

"Riiiight," Grey says, raising his eyebrow to show he knows what absolute horse shit Dex is shovelling.

"No more than you have," Dex says, and gives him a look that only a friend who knows the truly dumb things he has done in his life could manage. Not that he's going to admit to any of it.

"I think you win the Portland Dumb-Things-I-Have-Done Sweepstakes," he tries.

"At least the dumb things I've done never landed me in prison," Dex shoots back.

"Ouch." Grey clutches his chest in mock pain. "Low blow, Perios."

Dex smirks, then grimaces when the smirk hurts her split lip.

Another five minutes passes, during which neither of them says a word, and there are no sounds but the hiss of breath whenever Grey hits a particularly sensitive spot.

"At least tell me you won the fight," Grey finally says as he finishes up.

"If by won you mean delayed that asshole's escape with my face until the cops showed up and arrested him for assault, then yeah, I won the fight."

"Ya know what?" Grey puts the cap on the peroxide bottle and looks Dex dead in the eye. "I take it back. You don't win the Dumb Things I Have Done Sweepstakes for Portland. You win it for the entire Pacific Northwest."

"Fuck you, too, Grey."

"Watch it, or I'll remember that the next time I need to patch you up."

"What makes you think there's going to be a next time?" Dex asks, and the question is so ridiculous it punches a quick laugh out of him. In the six years he's known her, Grey hasn't known Dex Perios to go more than a month between fights.

Dex socks him in the shoulder in return, hard enough that he knows that she means it, soft enough that he knows he's still her best friend.

* * *

The first time Grey patched up Dex, closing a cut over her eye with a butterfly bandage and wrapping gauze over the contusions on her knuckles, he saw the fight happen.

He'd only known her a few weeks, but they were already friends. 

Good friends. 

Best friends, he would have admitted if pressed. They fit together in ways he hadn't expected after that first disastrous hook-up. He should have known even then, though, how close they'd become. Because Dex had trusted him with Ansel in those first 24 hours, and that wasn't nothing.

This fight started in a bar. Dex had had maybe too many beers. (Definitely too many beers. He'd only known her a few weeks and he already knew that definitely-too-many-beers was Dex just getting started.) 

She'd gone to get them another round, and he was watching as she got the bartender's attention. Was watching as she caught the attention of the jerk standing next to her. Was watching as the jerk put a hand on her in a way he definitely shouldn't have. Was watching as she dropped the glass she'd been holding and swung on him with an uppercut that was as sloppy as it was impressive.

It was over by the time Grey pushed his way to the bar, elbowing through the people escaping from the fight and the people drawn to it. Dex was standing over the guy, blood streaming down her face from a stray punch the guy must've landed on her when the crowd had blocked his view of her, and he'd panicked in a way he hadn't done since prison.

Grey avoided them getting kicked out of the bar by dragging Dex out with him, leaving the bartender and the bouncers to deal with the asshole lying on the floor.

"You do this often?" he'd asked her once they got back to his place, after he'd wiped away the blood and gotten the cut over her eye closed up with a butterfly bandage that had come in the box with all the nice normal bandages meant for people who got injured doing nice normal things like cutting up vegetables, not doing ridiculous things like fighting handsy assholes in bars.

"No," she'd said in a way that definitely meant yes.

"Well, shit," Grey had said, two words sufficient to express the world of trouble he knew he was getting into having Dex Parios as a friend. 

As his best friend.

* * *

"Didn't the army teach you to fight?" he asked after the second time he saw her punch another asshole in another bar. This time, the asshole had been stupid enough to slap his girlfriend within sight of Dex, and the fight had been much messier. Dex had come out of it worse, with blood on her teeth and one eye nearly swollen shut.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Dex asked as she took the glass of salt water he'd passed her, swished it around in her mouth, and spit blood into his sink.

"It means you're sloppy. You drop your guard, leave yourself open when you shouldn't. You swing too wide when you don't need to. You're not bad, but you're getting by with a combination of rage and raw talent, and that's only going to get you so far."

"Oh, yeah," she said, and stuck the bag of peas she'd grabbed from his freezer on her eye. "Where'd you get to be an expert on fighting?"

"Prison," he said bluntly, shutting her up for a good minute and a half.

"Huh," she finally said, squinting at him through her one open eye. "You wanna show me what you know?"

"I might," he said, knowing it was equal parts a good and bad idea.

* * *

He found beat up boxing gloves in a thrift store, got hand wraps from the boxing gym down the street, then twice a week he'd push the furniture in his place against the walls and they'd box.   
He'd show her everything he'd learned from the big guy three cells over. The one who'd nearly made it onto the Olympics boxing team before his spectacularly bad employment choices had ended in a sentence of three to five years.

In return, she'd show him everything she'd learned from the army and Afghanistan and years of being a tough woman who didn't back down from assholes.

Somewhere along the way, Grey told Dex that with a sister like her, it might be a good idea to teach Ansel how to defend himself, so he started joining their lessons. 

Ansel didn't actually like the boxing.

"I don't want to punch anyone," he said after Grey showed him a simple jab cross combination, his nose wrinkling in a way Grey had come to realize meant he absolutely did NOT like something.

"I don't know," Dex said, her whole face lit up in an impish grin. "Punching someone can be pretty satisfying." It had certainly satisfied her the night before, when she'd taken a swing at an asshole she'd caught roofying an already-drunk college girl at the bar they'd gone to.

"Don't listen to her, kid," Grey said, elbowing Dex out of the way. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to." He thought for a minute then had an idea. "How about I show you something else?"

So, he showed Ansel how to break out of a simple wrist hold. And when the kid managed that, he showed him how to get out of increasingly harder holds, until he nearly busted his sister's nose getting out of a headlock. 

Grey high-fived him for that one.

In revenge, Dex showed Ansel how to do a hip throw, and insisted he practice on Grey.

* * *

And here they are, six years later. Dex is still trying to pay off her bills chasing the next big win at the craps table, and is still getting in fights. Grey is getting ready to open his own bar, and is still patching her up.

Dex still fights with rage and raw talent, but she also doesn't leave her guard down anymore.

Grey has taken an actual first aid course so he knows how to patch her up the right way, and he has a first aid kit under his bathroom sink that would make a paramedic jealous.

It ain't a bad life.

And if he sometimes thinks back on their disastrous hook-up and thinks maybe it wasn't so disastrous after all, he's not stupid enough to say the words out loud. 

Six years later, and he's seen the rate Dex goes through men and women, and that the number she sticks around for is exactly zero. He doesn't want to be another conquest abandoned along the way. He's with Dex for the long haul.

"Hey, why are you smiling?" Dex asks, and socks him in the shoulder again, harder this time, so he knows she's annoyed.

"No reason," he says, and smiles again.

"Asshole," she says, but she's smiling, too.

"Takes one to know one," he shoots back. 

No, it ain't a bad life at all.


End file.
